What She Found There - Judy Radin

On the day she didn’t die Joanna thought about changing her name. She’d just turned thirty, which sounded very old, but she felt like a newborn. After a lifetime of believing that one day she would kill herself, suddenly she didn’t want to die. But her platelets were falling and the Prednisone wasn’t working. Everyone around her knew where things were heading: cerebral hemorrhage and then death.

But somehow she pulled through – and it wasn’t the medicine. Joanna knew that even if no one else agreed. She’d been on Prednisone for weeks and nothing had changed. She continued spiking high fevers several time each day, which had to be brought down to normal with ice packs and aspirin.

Then Joanna’s doctor told her she would have to do a bone marrow test if Joanna’s platelets didn’t start rising. Maybe there was more going on then an autoimmune reaction. Just the thought of that long needle piercing her hip to extract bone marrow made her cringe – not to mention that on top of lupus she might have leukemia, too.
That night, Joanna had a long talk with herself. There was no way she was going to let this happen. Not leukemia, not a bone marrow test. Not after all she’d been through already. She repeated this mantra over and over and over in her head, all night long. Even when her fever rose to 104 at 3 AM g she repeated it to herself. Even when they filled her bed with ice packs and ice cubes, she repeated her mantra. Within 24 hours her fevers became less frequent and her platelets started to rise.

The doctors assumed the Prednisone was finally working, but Joanna knew the truth. She knew it was her will. She felt it that night and she could still feel it. She knew she had inner resources that could move mountains. Nothing was out of her reach. She would get well, get out of the hospital, and get herself back to Berkeley. That’s when it came to her that she wanted to change her name, to mark the occasion of her rebirth. Her new name would reflect her new inner strength.

She decided to take her great-grandmother’s maiden name. Joanna’s grandmother adopted the name when she emigrated from Lithuania to New York at the turn of the twentieth century. She was only seventeen and she was leaving her family and her village to find a better life with more opportunities for education and independence. Joanna thought of her grandmother and it just clicked. As soon as she was well enough, she would go to court and also take that name, to honor her grandmother and all her female ancestors who also had to dig deep and find inner strength in order to survive in a world with many obstacles.